Plume reached at least 50,000 feet high-

– – – – – –
– Although Governor Bobby Jindal may think volcano monitoring is a great waste of money, you can get good information at the Alaska Volcano Observatory.
– Added 3/25/2009. Don’t  sneer at science — volcano monitoring saves lives. By Joel Connelly. Seattle Post-Intelligencer.  Connelly points out the many beautiful and merely dormant “flamethrowers” of the Pacific Northwest.
–  Added 3/25/2009. Photos of Alaskan Volcano’s Eruption. By Betsy Mason. Wired Magazine.

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About The Author

Ralph Maughan

Dr. Ralph Maughan is professor emeritus of political science at Idaho State University. He was a Western Watersheds Project Board Member off and on for many years, and was also its President for several years. For a long time he produced Ralph Maughan's Wolf Report. He was a founder of the Greater Yellowstone Coalition. He and Jackie Johnson Maughan wrote three editions of "Hiking Idaho." He also wrote "Beyond the Tetons" and "Backpacking Wyoming's Teton and Washakie Wilderness." He created and is the administrator of The Wildlife News.

3 Responses to Alaska's Mount Redoubt finally erupts

  1. SAP says:

    Ralph – great point about Jindal and the willfully-ignorant earmark bashers. Don’t like the earmark process? Do away with it entirely — don’t just single out the ones that make for good Leno-Limbaugh soundbites.

    Turns out, of course, that Alaska’s volcanoes really ARE something for the nation to worry about: military aircraft that keep an eye on our “friends” in the North Pacific had to be grounded due to volcanic ash at 50,000′.

    It would be fascinating to see what would happen if Congress did away with earmarks entirely. It would probably save a few hundred million on “Birthplace of Lawrence Welk National Historic Site”-type projects over the coming decades. The downside would be that every worthy project — like keeping an eye on Alaska’s volcanoes — might then require its own piece of legislation. That would be nice in a perfect world, but there’s only so many hours in a day, so many days in a year for Congress to write, debate, and pass separate pieces of legislation.

    I guess principled leadership by both parties in Congress would be too much to ask for, too . . .

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‎"At some point we must draw a line across the ground of our home and our being, drive a spear into the land and say to the bulldozers, earthmovers, government and corporations, “thus far and no further.” If we do not, we shall later feel, instead of pride, the regret of Thoreau, that good but overly-bookish man, who wrote, near the end of his life, “If I repent of anything it is likely to be my good behaviour."

~ Edward Abbey

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